Priscilla Frake
Broken Lines
I am broken. My time is broken
into lists and chores, into litanies
of haste and lack. The back of my day
is broken. When I walk, my steps
are broken and I hobble along
in a pencil skirt and stilettos.
If you’re moving through your own broken
days you might know what I mean. You’re breathing
shards and eating what used to be food
but is now scraps of calories.
Your fingers rattle on the keyboard
in staccato bursts, then break off
for incoming missiles. It used to be
an exchange, but now it’s so many flares
and rockets, humming through midnight’s
orange sky. What does it mean
to be broken? This is what I ask
myself, since no one seems likely
to answer. The question itself
is deconstructed in texts
I can’t receive. Did I mention
my phone is broken? Perhaps
some version of the sky is whole
but the earth is damaged
and we keep arguing about how to fix it
with nothing but broken words.
Priscilla Frake is the author of Correspondence (Mutabilis Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Nimrod, Midwest Quarterly, Medical Literary Messenger, Carbon Culture Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and The New Welsh Review, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies Weaving the Terrain: 100-Word Southwestern Poems (Dos Gatos Press, 2017), edited by David Meischen and Scott Wiggerman; Enchantment of the Ordinary, (Mutabilis Press, 2019), edited by John Gorman; and Women. Period. (Spinsters Ink, 2008), edited by Julia Watts, Parneshia Jones, Jo Ruby and Elizabeth Slade. Frake lives in Asheville, NC, where she is a studio jeweler.
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